To the Cheshire Station: Alan Garner and John Mackenzie's Red Shift

To the Cheshire Station: Alan Garner and John Mackenzie’s Red Shift (1978) Brian Baker In Alan Garner’s 1973 novel Red Shift, set within the county of Cheshire, one of the interconnected male protagonists, Tom, stands upon the hill of Mow Cop, a site which is important to the three layered narratives (in Roman Britain, at the time of the Civil War, and in the present) that make up the novel. Negotiating an increasingly difficult (and long-distance) relationship with the trainee nurse Jan, Tom begins to psychologically disintegrate under pressure from his family and in trying to manage his own feelings. On Mow Cop, he asks Jan ‘Where am I?’, and then provides his own answer: ‘My right leg,’ said Tom,’ at this moment, is in the township of Odd Rode, in the parish of Astbury, in the hundred of Northwich, and the county and diocese of Chester, in the province of York. My left leg is in the township of Stadmorslow, in the parish of Wolstanton, in the hundred of Pinehill, in the county of Stafford, in the diocese of Lichfield, in the province of Canterbury. You see my predicament. […] [I]t’s worse in there. There, the map says, the boundary is undefined.’ (Garner 2002: 110) An emblem of Tom’s own psychological dislocation and lack of definition, Mow Cop, which stands on the border of Cheshire and Staffordshire and between the Midlands and the North, is a literal projection of an emotional and psychological state. As I will undertake to analyse in this chapter, both Garner’s Red Shift and the BBC Play for Today adaptation of the novel, which was broadcast in 1978, are filled with images of physical mobility and of communications technologies: the M6 motorway, Crewe railway station, bicycles, a cassette recorder, written letters (the novel ends with one, given to the reader in code). In Red Shift, Garner’s locatedness in the particular landscapes, topography and places of Cheshire – in fact East Cheshire, from Alderley Edge out towards Garner’s birthplace near Congleton – is in tension with a recurrent motif of transmission, of words and people and vehicles moving through the county. The M6 motorway connects up the urban and industrial centres of the West Midlands with the commercial and logistical networks of the North West; Crewe railway junction is a hub that connects London, Liverpool and Glasgow on what is known as the West Coast Mainline, along with numerous interchange lines to Manchester, Chester and Holyhead, and the Potteries. Cheshire is characterised, in Red Shift, by being in transit, in flux rather than fixed in space (and, in the novel’s narrative structure, in time). As Tom says about Mow Cop, its boundaries become ‘undefined’. In a sense, this is unusual in Garner’s oeuvre, for his work is known for its long negotiation with the country of Cheshire, its rootedness in Cheshire’s villages and hills, its myths and histories. Garner’s first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), is a fantasy novel in which two children discover a miraculous cave under Alderley Edge, in which the forces of light lay dormant and await the necessity of awakening to battle the forces of darkness, and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), traverses the same geography. Later novels such as Boneland (2012), which completes the Weirdstone sequence, and Thursbitch (2003) are also deeply invested with actual places in Cheshire. (Walks are conducted around the Thursbitch topography for interested readers.) Cheshire seems to be a fixed place in Garner’s imagination, one in which historical and mythic resonances can be transmitted through place and across time. However, this is to somewhat misconstrue the actual geography and history of the county. If Cheshire is understood to be defined by its borders, then these have changed over time. Some are fixed by geography: the northern edge of the county is defined by the path of the River Mersey – the other bank is Lancashire – and rather more porously, the conurbation of Greater Manchester. To the south-west, it is defined by the path of the River Dee and the Welsh hills (where I write this chapter). To the East, the Pennines. In a history of the county, Alan Crosby writes that, standing upon Shining Tor above Macclesfield, it is possible to see all of ‘historic Cheshire […] in that single view. It thus has a very clear geographical unity and coherence’ (Crosby 1996: 13). And yet some of its borders and boundaries have changed markedly. A map of historic Cheshire looks something like the tilted head of a bull, with two horns sticking out: the Wirral peninsula to the north-west, and the narrow Longdendale isthmus to Mottram and Tintwistle in the north-east. Local government reorganisations have shorn these two horns: Longdendale is now part of Greater Manchester (Tameside), while the Wirral is a separate authority. Cheshire’s bull (a creature that is central to the narrative of Thursbitch) has been mutilated, its geography and boundaries altered. It is also worth considering that Cheshire is a boundary: between England and Wales to the west, and between the North of England and the Midlands to the South. Paul Morley, in The North (and almost everything in it) (2014) writes: Few English counties owe more of their history to their geographical position and surroundings, and to the character of their natural features, than Cheshire. The north begins in the Cheshire Plain, a flat area of land covering thousands of square miles bounded by the hills of north Wales to the west, the Derbyshire Peak District to the east and the Pennines to the north-east. It was once under the ocean, but emerged from the water, dried out, leaving vast salt deposits, and remained remote from the early maritime influences affecting the English South. It begins with the mossy, peaty, fast-flowing or lazily drifting rivers cutting through the plain. (Morley 2014: 8). In Morley’s short locating of the North ‘beginning’ at the Cheshire Plain, we find fixity (the ranges of hills on the borders) and flux (the rivers), the importance of nature and natural resources, the crucial role of movement across the terrain (the rivers and the salt-routes that are important to Garner’s Thursbitch), and also isolation, remoteness, dislocation. In many of Garner’s texts, there is a direct connection between land and sky. In Red Shift, Tom and Jan try to ensure some kind of emotional closeness by looking up at the constellation of Orion at the same time on a winter’s night, their consciousness of each other transmitted through the astrological sphere. Unlike the rather more mystical and trans-historical connection between Tom, Macey and Thomas Fowler, the three male protagonists of the novel, this purely visual nexus quickly degrades. In ‘The Edge of the Ceiling’, an autobiographical essay in Alan Garner’s non-fiction collection The Voice That Thunders (1997), Garner talks about his childhood in Cheshire when, sequentially confined to his room by diphtheria, meningitis and pneumonia, he discovered ‘a forest in the ceiling, with hills and clouds, and a road to the horizon’ (Garner 1997b: 10). Between sleeping, catnapping and coma, Garner suggests that he was able, by ‘switching himself off’, to enter a different world in the ceiling, to ‘live’ in the ceiling when his ability to ‘live’ in the ‘real’ world of Cheshire was reduced by chronic pain and debility. Reduction pertains more to the world of the ceiling than to Garner’s bedroom, however. While ‘the world of the ceiling was three-dimensional, objects were solid, visual perspectives true’ (Garner 1997b: 11), Garner writes that the world of the bed became ‘the permanent choice’ of where to truly live because of the constraints of the world of the ceiling: Although the way to the ceiling was along the same road in the ceiling, the land beyond the road, from visit to visit, was inconsistent; and this inconsistency made the ceiling not more interesting but less. Each venture was separate rather than a learning, and such variety leads nowhere; it builds nothing; it has nothing to teach. And I wanted to learn. That was the difference. I would enter the ceiling by an act of will, but left it through tedium. Sooner or later, I would stop whatever I was doing in the ceiling, turn around, and always be facing the same road-forest-cloud- hill picture that I saw from my bed. Then I would pull back as a camera does to the bed and lie looking at the lime-wash plaster. (Garner 1997b: 11-12) Without wishing to assert some kind of biographical ‘key’ to Garner’s writing, this relation between the bed and the ceiling seems to figure the spatial and temporal relationships in many of Garner’s books. There are two spatial planes, and an observer or observers whose consciousness forms a kind of bridge or conduit between these planes (or, as in Red Shift, between each other). The ceiling can be taken to figure the relation between land and sky, but it also represents a spatio-temporal relation between different historical periods which come into contact through some kind of emotional, psychological or ritual resonance. Garner’s texts are planar fictions. They are structured with two (or in Red Shift, multiple) planes that move independently in time/space but can be brought into alignment through the workings of an object (the ‘thunderstone’ or axe-head) or through consciousness (the bed and the ceiling, the visions that connect Macey, John Fowler and Tom in Red Shift). They are not fictions of mapping but rather fictions of the alignment of co-ordinates: it is no coincidence that ‘The Edge of the Ceiling’ begins ‘My name is Alan Garner, and I was born, with the cord twice wrapped round my throat, in the front room of 47 Crescent Road, Congleton, Cheshire, at Latitude 53°09’40”N, Longitude 02°13’7” W, at 21.30 on Wednesday, 17 October 1934’ (Garner 1997b: 3).

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